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Tara - Motor Motor Motor



Ok, serious boredom has set in. Definition: I just cleaned out the pencil box! Why does a boat of 800 square feet need 14 highlighters, 8 sharpies, and a fifty cent pen from damn near every hotel that Lisa and I have ever stayed in?

Oh, and most importantly I found the missing chart-plotter chip that provides the detailed navigational information of reefs, harbors, marinas, etc. for The Azores and the Western Med. For those friends that have been involved in the search, it is FINALLY over! (Hey Diana!) This is no small thing! Well, the chip is tiny but its importance is huge. The little bastard was $400.00+ and I had to special order the thing from the UK because I guess there is not a big market of buyers crossing the Atlantic Ocean at the local West Marine. Anyway, we had this computer chip ordered months ago and sent to Lisa’s ex while we were in the Caribbean (A long story in and of itself. Thanks Mark Kite for being our personal Post Office!). Lisa’s son was probably told 100 times to place it in a safe spot and bring it to us carefully. Well, we get the damn thing and I treat it like the gold bullion that it is and place it in a sacred spot.

You know the rest of the story. A) it wasn’t where I put it or b) I forgot the sacred spot. Since Lisa is a clean freak it was easy to blame her. Since I am an idiot, it is easy for her to blame me! Lisa and I searched for the chip for about a month and had to make a decision about ordering another. We did what any sane person would do, we procrastinated until it was too late to special order one again! So we set sail without and hoped paper charts could get us safely into Horta’s harbor. Hey, Columbus did it with a sextant and no charts! Well, actually it was an Astrolabe (sp?) but how many of you know what that is? As it turns out, Lisa didn’t move it and I didn’t forget the proper spot. It was right where it was supposed to be but had become nestled between papers. We both looked in that spot ten times to no avail. Well, we have it now. Side note: The chip has a sticker on it that says if we register it online before inserting it we get a year of free updates so we are going to try the paper chart method anyway. We are old school that way! But I’ll keep it in my pocket just in case the entrance looks challenging.

Have I mentioned my wife Lisa? She is the world’s greatest sailing companion. She works tirelessly to everyone’s benefit and is certainly the MVP of this crew! We have been eating fabulously and it didn’t come about without a ton of planning and worry. She is amazing! Though she did make one mistake. We left St Martin with 56 bottles of wine April 1st and it is all gone! You could say we are connoisseurs but that would be far from true. The vast majority of the wine came in 5 liter boxes that had the equivalent of the French ‘Piggly Wiggly’ or ‘Safeway’ stamped prominently on all four sides. Yes, Joern, Diana, Mitch, Mel, Rich, Sam, Ralph, Jackie, Kurt, Michelle, and many others, you were drinking red and whites that cost about $2.50 a bottle. (We usually hid the fact that we were pouring from plastic bags! Hey, it’s a boat, bottles break!)

We have decided to motor Northeast since the weather forecasts hint at a smidge of wind up there in two days. We have been motoring for 30 hours straight and are sick of it already. The route will take us up into the ‘roaring forties’ and into the iceberg zone. OK, that last sentence was for dramatic effect. Sorry Mom! They are hardly roaring and the odds of ice are low. In fact, as a mariner, 50 percent of my reason for altering course was just so that I can say I’ve been north of 40 to other sailors at every coastal pub from here to Greece. It seems to be a good move because we are being helped along by a favorable current that has increased our speed to make up for the further distance to be traveled. Well, if no wind exists up there I can go find another pencil box to clean. Who knows what I’ll find this time!



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